Come to grips

To come to grips

Today’s English expression is “to come to grips.” What does it mean to come to grips with something? It means to accept it and to understand the full meaning of something—usually something sad. Brazil is still coming to grips with what happened at their national museum two weeks ago. They are still processing it, still trying to understand and accept what it means. Sometimes after something shocking happens, it can take some time to come to grips with what happened—to understand it fully and to accept how your life might be different as a result.

It can be very hard to come to grips with the death of a loved one—whether it’s a parent, a spouse, sibling, or a good friend. Any time we lose someone close to us, our lives change. We feel a little emptier, right? And sometimes it takes a while to get used to the change. It takes a while to come to grips with the loss of a loved one. But we do process it, and move on, even as we remember the person that we lost. We do eventually come to grips with that loss.

A person might struggle to come to grips with losing a job. I’m very fortunate that I’ve never lost a job in my career so far, but I know that it’s a very unsettling experience. For many people, it takes weeks—if not months—to come to grips with a job loss. But again, like other types of adversity, we do move on, we do come to grips with that type of a loss.

Sometimes you might tell someone to come to grips with reality. If you have a friend who spends too much money, buys stuff he or she can’t afford, you might offer that friend some tough love. You might tell your friend, hey, you have to come to grips with reality here. You can’t afford to keep spending a lot of money like this. You have to accept the reality of this situation, right?

Well, this happens twice a week. We now have to come to grips with the fact that today’s episode is about to end. But never fear—today is Monday and we’ll have another episode in just a few short days. We have new episodes every Monday and Thursday, so you can practice your English with podcasts twice a week. And it’s super easy if you click “subscribe” in your purple Apple Podcasts app or “follow” if you listen in Spotify. You might not know it, but if you have a recent iPhone, you already have the Apple Podcasts app installed. So that’s a great way to listen if you haven’t done that already.

JR and I are going to sign off for today. Have a great week. Send us a note if you like. [email protected] and [email protected] are our e-mail addresses; we love hearing from you. Either way, you’ll be hearing from us again on Thursday.